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The AI software Stable Diffusion has a remarkable ability to turn text into images. When I asked the software to draw "Mickey Mouse in front of a McDonald's sign," for example, it generated the picture you see above.
Stable Diffusion can do this because it was trained on hundreds of millions of example images harvested from across the web. Some of these images were in the public domain or had been published under permissive licenses such as Creative Commons. Many others were not—and the world's artists and photographers aren't happy about it.
In January, three visual artists filed a class-action copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, the startup that created Stable Diffusion. In February, the image-licensing giant Getty filed a lawsuit of its own.
[...]
The plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit describe Stable Diffusion as a "complex collage tool" that contains "compressed copies" of its training images. If this were true, the case would be a slam dunk for the plaintiffs.But experts say it's not true. Erik Wallace, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me in a phone interview that the lawsuit had "technical inaccuracies" and was "stretching the truth a lot." Wallace pointed out that Stable Diffusion is only a few gigabytes in size—far too small to contain compressed copies of all or even very many of its training images.
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(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday April 05 2023, @07:25AM
1) Are you giving people copies of that image on demand, potentially for commercial gain or to advertise your "brain" company? No. It's not illegal to "think" of Mickey Mouse. It's illegal to put him on a T-Shirt and/or claim it's an official Mickey Mouse product.
2) You think Russia doesn't enforce its rights when it smells profit? I think you should read up on the story of Tetris, for instance (the movie is okay, but largely fabrication, try finding a real history). You think China would let an AI spew out Tiananmen Square images without having something to say about it?
"Legal" doesn't get in the way of infrastructure, it stops someone building a highway through your back garden or surrounding your little country house with skyscrapers or ghettos making it unsaleable.
Infrastructure projects in the US fail because infrastructure needs huge investment without profit first. Then you resell that service/infrastructure to for-profit companies who could never afford to do it on their own. Train lines, highways, space travel, telecoms (of old, it's easier now), postal services etc.
You *PUT MONEY INTO* infrastructure, there's no profit in it except exceptionally long-term (and hence it's good for government, useless for private companies to try it). You *MAKE MONEY* by utilising existing infrastructure to your advantage (for your workers, your services, etc.).
Literally, infrastructure is a socialist venture - everyone contributing so everyone benefits - and America doesn't understand that you can't be an entirely capitalist or an entirely socialist country. Infrastructure is socialism. Healthcare, transport, electrical networks, water supply, etc. Service provision on the back of that infrastructure is capitalist, and that's how you pay it back.
But without spending BILLIONS first, with no expectation of return, nobody is going to make profit. In the UK, the only original cable TV supplier went bankrupt because it was trying to do it all on its own. Its successor never actually installed that much more cable in 30+ years since.
It's the one thing Musk could be useful for, by the way, except he has no intention of actually providing for people, he's still expecting to get every penny he spends back.